Let’s Get Creative With Zelda Spinoffs

ZD writes: This is a topic I’ve covered a few times in a lesser capacity, mostly in the mailbag: The subject of Zelda spinoffs. When discussing new ideas for the main Zelda series, a lot of people, myself included, are wary of introducing too many changes into the series, and changing what makes it Zelda. Some argue that this restricts new ideas too much and therefore stagnates the series. While that might be true, effectively every video game series, no matter how much it experiments, needs to have core tenets in place that keep it at least partially the same from game to game. Otherwise it’s not really a series, and more importantly, fans of the series will have no reason to play the newer titles, because they will have nothing in common with the game they liked. So while new ideas are good — if not at all mandatory — a series generally needs to stay the same in certain areas.
(3DS, GameCube, Nintendo DS, Retro, The Legend of Zelda, Wii)